A Butterfly Flower

I live in a small beach town by the Gulf of Mexico in Florida, that keeps beauty at the forefront of our community. Our small city has won beautification awards on a national level and I volunteer when I can to help meet our communities’ goals. Now having three children, my volunteer hours are a tad less than they use to be. I remember driving to the beach early one morning and seeing volunteers from our community driving from planter to planter watering the hanging baskets of flowers downtown, at 5 AM in the morning. So, it was no surprise to me when I heard about an Urban Forest was being created within the city limits. An Urban Forest is where you take a deserted location in a city and dedicate it back to nature. Ours happens to be an old Ringling Bros. Circus railroad corridor that was abandoned, the tracks and pilings buried. The goal was to use native flora to attract native fauna. Since I volunteered my time for the non-profit, Venice Area Beautification Inc. that happened to be building this beautiful Urban Forest, they hired me for this sub-committee. They wanted me to create, design, and develop awareness for their new project. I chose to do this through photography, website design, and social media posts. It went hand in hand, as the photography I took I could then edit and create social media posts from the , to share and bring awareness to our community.

Multiple trips in various stages happened before I started seeing local fauna start to enjoy this Urban Forest. What was neat is while digging holes for the new oak trees to be planted, the excavators found railroad stakes and hidden history buried in the soil of our town. We even have a photograph at our Natural Museum of History of the circus elephants walking across the middle bridge onto Venice Island, steps away from where they now have built this huge Urban Forest. Ringling Brothers use to use Venice as their training grounds. Seeing this Urban Forest take creation from nothing to a beautiful landscape of trees and flowers filled with animals of all sizes brought me as much joy as seeing this photograph for the first time. I captured this photo, following this butterfly around from flower to flower while walking through the beginning stages of our Urban Forest. I was taking so many photos that morning, including small video clips of nature, that when I saw this photo, I was pleasantly surprised I had captured this photo exactly right. It was almost as if the butterfly was trying to become one of the flowers.

Now I am a fine artist, I paint in oils most of the time. So, when I started looking through a lens and shooting photographs, my favorite part has always been editing my photos in Lightroom, a photography editing program through Adobe. The unique aspect of this photo is that I had to keep myself from editing this photo too much. I even have versions where I darkened the shadows and brought the light down, giving it a very moody feel. However, I feel like it took away from the beauty of the subject matter that this butterfly was lending to the flowers around it. So, I decided to first crop the photo where I thought the butterfly disguised as one of the flowers was the focal point. Then I altered the intensity of the orange just a tad. Switched the hue of the green to compliment the orange, and then stopped and saved it before I edited it too much.